It comprises the totality of a student’s experiences at school, but more importantly the classroom academic learning dimension of the O’Connell experience.

• Guaranteed?

The same essential content is taught in all classrooms.

• Viable?

With academic success at the forefront, learning content is appropriate to the age and ability of the students.

Learning content can be taught in the time available to the teachers.

1. Course teams should ideally not choose the same priority standards spanning year-to-year.
2. Instead, course teams should make decisions about when to prioritize or turn focus away from each standard.

Your Mission: Write Enduring Understandings (Big Ideas) for each of your course units and record them in Atlas by Wednesday, January 31, 2024.

- Once you have written and completed the Enduring Understandings for all the units of each course you teach, please respond in the igKnight Canvas assignment's text entry box to the following: 

What was your design and work process for writing Enduring Understandings?

How did you move beyond the standards to articulate the particular understandings your students should acquire during a unit?

• Enduring Understanding:

  • Broad, overarching concepts & ideas that help students organize and make sense of information

  • Includes core themes, concepts, principles, theories, & processes within a discipline

  • Recurring & transferrable to other contexts beyond this year, grade level, or discipline

- Once you have written and completed the Essential Questions for all the units of each course you teach, please respond in the igKnight Canvas assignment's text entry box to the following:

What was your design and work process for writing Essential Questions?

What did you find most challenging, rewarding, and/or surprising about this stage of the curricular design work?

As you create the Essential Questions for your units, it may be helpful to reference some characteristics below:

• Essential Questions:

  • Engaging, open-ended questions that promote higher-level thinking

  • Spark authentic student conversations and help raise new questions

  • Lead students to central ideas of a unit

  • Will transfer to other contexts beyond the unit

During 2022-2023, we worked in our departmental teams, 

as members of a school-wide professional learning community, to identify course Priority Standards.

1. The facts, concepts, generalizations and principles that are the focus of our curriculum.

2. Consciously understood factual information

3. What students can explain to others

   
   

Your Mission: Take each of a course's 8-15 standards and break them into roughly 30 declarative and procedural objectives. To start out, use the stems “Students will understand…” and “Students will be able to…” to explicitly distinguish between declarative and procedural objectives.

As a second level of drafting, consider using Revised Bloom’s verbs to more specifically denote declarative objectives.

For instance, “Students will retrieve/paraphrase/illustrate/distinguish/design/justify…”

See O'Connell's Unit Template and Style Guide (also linked from your Atlas units) for further guidance.

While developing your Course Content & Skills,

you may also want to consider the following questions:

• Is this a core building block?

  • Consider knowledge transfer

  • Avoid less important facts or definitions that won’t contribute to long-term understanding

• Will these be assessed?

  • Only include Learning Objectives that you will explicitly teach and assess

• Do these fit naturally into the unit?

  • Do not include elements that are disconnected or arbitrary

• Does it make sense to unpack both the priority & supporting standards?

  • Consider only unpacking priority standards for units

    
    

This was to consider the components of assessment design and how we can apply best practices to units of study.

Now, it's time to add our unit summative assessments to Atlas!

Head to bishopoconnell.rubiconatlas.org

Click into one of your courses and a unit and scroll down to Stage 2: Summative Assessments.

Check out the little encircled "i" to the right of Assessments for info on Performance Tasks and Supplementary Evidence.

Then, under "Assessments," click "Add New Assessment"

You'll then choose an Assessment Type and Assessment Method.

Add an Assignment Description and any Attachments that pertain to the Assessment (links, files, Google Drive)

Make sure to also click which Unit Targeted Standards the assessment is...assessing!

Add 1+ Summative Assessment(s) for each unit in each of your courses.

• Performance Tasks: What evidence will show that students understand?

  • A task that uses one's knowledge to effectively act or bring to fruition a complex product that reveals one's knowledge and expertise. This is an authentic assessment that asks students to use knowledge in real-world ways, with genuine purposes, audiences, and situational variables. 

  • Ex. Music recital, oral presentation, art display, technology competition.

• Supplementary Evidence: What other evidence needs to be collected to meet Stage 1 Desired Results

  • Other (often more traditional) assessments of knowledge, skill, and standards that are not otherwise assessed by the performance task. 

  • Ex. Tests, quizzes, prompts, work samples, observations